Navarro

by Ralph Compton

  The rurale was down on his left side, clutching his right thigh with his right hand. He held his old Remington in his left, but he didn’t try to lift it. He raised his head to Tom, his eyes snapping wide.

  “Please have mercy!” he cried in Spanish.

  “I always heard there wasn’t any mercy in Mexico.”

  Navarro triggered the Winchester from his hip, drilling a round through the rurale’s heart, then turned and walked back to the trail. He put the other two wounded men out of their misery, then stood in the middle of the trail, peering into the valley bisected by the silver stream. He watched and listened.

  No hoofbeats or moving shadows. Only crickets and the breeze ruffling the sage and Mormon tea.

  Leaving the dead men where they’d fallen, Navarro mounted his bay and gigged it over the ridge.

  Chapter 25

  Navarro’s group traveled for two more hours, heading steadily northward, navigating by moonlight. When Karla and Billie were nearly falling from their mounts with exhaustion, Navarro found a hollow below a rocky pass. He and Hawkins picketed the horses near a grass-lined spring, while Louise set up camp and rolled out blankets near a small fire for the girls.

  When the horses had been fed, watered, and rubbed down with dry grass, Navarro walked into the small circle of firelight reflecting off the jumbled boulders behind it. Karla and Billie lay curled beneath their blankets while Louise filled a speckled blue pot from a hide-covered canteen.

  “They all right?” he asked the woman.

  “As far as I can tell, there are no lasting physical injuries. It looks like they’ve both been drugged.”

  “Opium, no doubt.”

  “Tommy?”

  Navarro turned to Karla. She lay regarding him from beneath her blanket, firelight flickering in her drawn hazel eyes. He knelt beside her and she rose up on her hip, threw her arms around his neck, and sobbed, “I’m so sorry!”

  “Shhh,” Tom said, smoothing her hair down the back of her head. “You rest now. We got some hard ridin’ ahead of us.”

  She sobbed again, then lay her head back down, and her eyes closed. A minute later, her shoulders rose and fell slowly and her breaths grew deep and regular. The blanket had slipped up her leg, revealing a smooth curve of tender thigh and a bare foot. Tom thoughtfully pulled the blanket down over the bared skin, drew it up snug to her neck.

  When Louise and Hawkins had turned in, Navarro climbed a rise on the other side of the spring to keep the first watch. The night was quiet, and for that, he felt great relief. He was sitting with his back to a boulder, fighting sleep, when something rustled on the slope behind him, toward the camp. He turned his head quickly to see a shadow moving toward him.

  “It’s me,” Louise said, weeds crunching beneath her shoes. She knelt down beside him, extending the steaming tin cup in her left hand. She held another in her right. “I thought you might need this.”

  “Just what the doctor ordered.” Navarro took the coffee and sipped. “I figured you’d be asleep.”

  “So did I,” Louise said, sitting down beside him and resting her back against the rock. “But when I lay down, I felt like I was still riding. I can take the first watch, if you’d like.”

  “Me and Mordecai can manage.”

  She sipped her coffee and turned to him with a wistful smile. “Don’t trust a woman?”

  “You got the girls to tend.”

  Louise rested her head back against the rock and stared out at the desert rolling away below the pass, beneath a sheen of milky light shed by a high, shrunken moon. After a while she said, “She’s beautiful.”

  Navarro looked at her.

  “Your Karla’s a beautiful girl.”

  Navarro shrugged and scratched his neck. “She’s had her share of suitors. It was a Mexican boy who caused to her run off like she did.”

  “If I’m not being too shamelessly forward, may I ask what your relationship is?”

  “I reckon that’s a might forward,” Navarro allowed with a grunt, blowing on his coffee. “She’s like a daughter to me. The daughter I never had, never will have. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Louise set her cup down beside her. “Never will have? How can you be so certain?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “Even if the right woman came along?”

  “The right woman won’t come along. I’m an ornery old cuss with a bad reputation. I’m going back to my cabin in the desert, and I’m going to stay there.”

  “If I’ve learned one thing in my thirty-six years, Mr. Navarro, it’s that one should never feel so certain about anything in this life.”

  Navarro grunted. “What about yourself?”

  She turned away, but he thought he saw a flush rise in her cheeks. “I’ve closed no doors. I reckon, if the right man came along. . . .”

  Tom looked at her, only inches away in the misty darkness. She was indeed a woman to twist a man’s heart. Looked good, with those brown eyes and that deep red hair. Smelled good, too, even after a long day’s ride. He liked the way he felt when she was near.

  Why in the hell did he have to be so set in his solitary ways?

  She’d turned to him again. They locked glances. His heart thumped, and he placed his hand under her chin, gently lifted her face, and closed his lips over hers. She pressed closer, placed her right hand on his arm, squeezed gently.

  They drew away from each other.

  “Maybe,” Navarro said, finding his voice, “if I’m down Benson way sometime, I’ll stop in for a visit.”

  Louise picked up her coffee cup and stood, brushing grass and sand from her skirt. “I best get back to the girls, see if they need anything. Good night, Tom.” She moved away, stopped, and turned back to him. “You stop by anytime.” Her soft footfalls rose as she descended the knoll to the camp.

  The next morning, Navarro was asleep against his saddle, hat tipped over his eyes, when a hand nudged his shoulder. He opened his eyes and raised the rifle he’d slept with in his hands.

  “It’s me, Tom,” Mordecai Hawkins said softly, hunkered down by Tom’s left shoulder. The sun was full up, and birds were winging overhead. Louise, Karla, and Billie were still curled asleep beneath their blankets, on the other side of the fire, over which a coffeepot chugged.

  Keeping his voice low, Hawkins said, “This might not be nothin’, but there’s a covered wagon comin’ up the pass, ’bout a mile away.”

  Immediately awake, Tom straightened his hat, stood, grabbed the field glasses from beside his saddle, and moved quickly but quietly across the camp. On a rocky ledge overlooking the trail, he trained the glasses down the pass, where the trail snaked through the creosote, cholla, and the occasional cottonwoods reaching up from low depressions.

  The sun was just above the eastern horizon, gilding the white canvas tarpaulin bowed over the oncoming wagon’s box. Compressing slightly as it started up the incline toward the pass, the Conestoga’s bulky shadow ran along the sage tufts on the west side of the two-track trail. The driver snapped the whip over the backs of the two mules in the traces, the animals leaning into their collars as the terrain rose beneath their hooves, the driver shouting shrill epithets. Even from this distance, the voice sounded familiar.

  Tom leveled the glasses on the driver’s face, adjusted the focus. Frowning, he said, “What the hell . . . ?”

  Beside him, Hawkins said, “Recognize that fella?”

  Navarro handed the glasses to Hawkins. Squatting, the old hide hunter doffed his floppy-brimmed hat, brought the glasses to his deeply spoked eyes, and chuckled a surprised curse. “Well, hell’s bells, that ain’t no fella!”

  Navarro took the glasses from Hawkins, said, “Let’s get out of sight,” and dropped down off the rock, slipping between two boulders on the east side of the trail. When he could hear the mules blowing wearily and the squawk of their leather collars, Tom stepped into the trail and held his rifle in one hand, barrel down at his side.

  The Conestoga was abou
t twenty yards away, just down from the saddle. The driver was peering off to her left. Spying Navarro in the periphery of her vision, she snapped her cow-eyed gaze forward, gasped, and leaned back on the ribbons, shouting, “Whooooo-ah! Whooooo!”

  When she had stopped the team, she stared over their sagging heads, drilling Navarro with a belligerent stare. He stared back at her—the female apron from Our Lady of Sorrows. Her round, fat face was flush-splotched; her heavy bosom rose and fell sharply as she breathed. Her cream-and-brown dress, cut low to reveal a good half of her milky bosom, was caked with seeds and trail dust. Her dark brown hair had partially escaped its bun, with several wisps pasted to her sweat-glistening cheeks.

  “I don’t have any money, if that’s what you’re after!” she yelled, her pig eyes narrowing. “Now get the hell out of my way or I’ll run ye down!”

  “I don’t think so,” Navarro said.

  She stared at him. “Where have I seen you before?”

  Navarro said nothing.

  The woman’s eyes brightened suddenly, and her chin snapped up. “You!” she rasped. With her right hand, she reached under the driver’s box, then pulled out an old Spencer carbine. She was raising the rifle and thumbing back the hammer, when Hawkins slipped out of the rocks beside the wagon, reached up, and wrestled the long gun from the woman’s pudgy hands.

  “What do you have in the box?” Navarro asked the woman. She was screaming so loudly at both of them, making up epithets as she went, that she couldn’t hear the question.

  Finally, Navarro walked around behind the wagon, loosened the puckered canvas over the tailgate. He peered inside. Several blankets had been strewn across the floorboards. Six girls in skimpy, soiled, sweat-stained dresses sat along the sideboards, their wrists and ankles tied with rawhide. One had a single pink feather dangling in her tangled hair.

  The wagon smelled of hot canvas, sweat, and urine. A tin pan sat in one corner of the wagon box, a few glistening drops sharing the pan’s bottom with a single dead fly.

  “Christ!” Navarrow growled, stepping back and fumbling with the tailgate latch.

  “You leave those girls right where they are, mister!” Sister Mary Francis screamed as she came running with surprising speed around the wagon’s east side.

  Hawkins tried to stop her, but she balled her right fist so tight it turned crimson. She brought it up from her knees, connecting soundly with Mordecai’s right jaw. Hawkins fell with a groan.

  Losing her balance, she nearly fell, too, but managed to stay standing and whirl toward Tom, balling the same fist she’d used on the old hide hunter.

  Having none of it, Navarro cocked his saddle gun one-handed and aimed it from his right thigh at the woman’s bulging belly.

  Seeing the rifle, she stopped. “They’re mine, goddamn you. I’m sellin’ ’em all in Nogales.” A thought flitted across her eyes. “Less’n you boys want to buy ’em with gold or cash money . . .”

  Navarro replied by tattooing her forehead with his Winchester’s butt plate. Eyes crossing, she staggered straight back and fell like a sack of potatoes.

  They spent the next two nights camped in a long green horseshoe of the Rio Bavispe. The freed girls ate the venison and rabbits Navarro shot, and slept off the effects of the opium.

  Karla and Louise helped the girls scrub the paint from their faces, and as Navarro and Hawkins smoked and drank coffee from a nearby bluff, keeping watch, they splashed around in the water, laughing, skipping stones, and talking about how good it would be to see their families again.

  Both nights, Mordecai Hawkins lulled the girls to sleep with gentle notes from his rusty harmonica. Young Marlene, who rarely strayed more than four feet from Karla, slept curled against the older girl’s side.

  Tom bound Sister Mary Francis, whom he intended to turn over to Phil Bryson at Fort Huachuca, and when the fat woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut, he gagged her. She may have been a nun at one time, but it probably hadn’t been much of a chore for Ettinger to recruit the pudgy slattern to run his brothel.

  The group pulled out the third morning, Louise driving the wagon, all the girls except Karla riding inside, Sister Mary Francis tied to one of the packhorses. They were riding single file through a narrow canyon, Navarro in the lead, Hawkins riding drag.

  Karla followed Tom on her high-stepping Arab. She kept a blanket draped over her bare shoulders; the sun had come out again after a strong wind and a brief, passing shower.

  Halfway through the canyon, Tom’s bay lifted its head sharply and whinnied.

  A rider stood atop a sandy knoll about thirty yards ahead and right of the rocky wash, partially concealed by a wind-gnarled pine. “ ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro!”

  The man was a long-faced, ghoulish-looking hombre in a battered, feather-trimmed derby, with gold rings in his ears. Over his right eye he wore a white bandage wrapped crosswise around his head, beneath the hat. The bandage was stained dark red. The blood had dripped out from under the bandage to run in a grisly rivulet down his cheek.

  Navarro halted his horse abruptly, one hand on his pistol butt.

  “Leave that hogleg where it is,” Bontemps warned, lifting his rifle to his shoulder and aiming at Karla. “I may be a poor, one-eyed sumbitch, but I can still kill that girl from here.”

  Silently cursing himself for not spotting the man earlier, Navarro slid his hand from the .44’s butt to his holster. “The girls are goin’ home where they belong.”

  “I don’t care about the girls. I want you. You’re gonna pay for my eye, you old bastard.”

  Navarro stared at the man, feeling as tired as he’d ever felt. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to lift his gun from his holster again. But he had to get the others out of here. “You’ll let the others go?”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the others.”

  Navarro turned in his saddle. “Ride on,” he told Louise, who was sitting the wagon’s driver’s seat.

  “Tommy . . .” Karla said.

  “Go,” Navarro said, more urgently this time, looking around the women at Hawkins.

  One hand on his pistol butt, jerking Sister Mary Francis’ mount along behind him, the old hide hunter gigged his horse up abreast of Karla. He reached over and grabbed the Arabian’s bridle. “Come on, honey.”

  “Tommy, he’s fast,” Karla said as Hawkins pulled her mount around Navarro’s bay. “I’ve seen him shoot.”

  “Take them on out of the canyon,” Navarro told Hawkins. “I’ll be along shortly.”

  Giving Tom a worried glance, Louise urged the mules on past him, Billie and the other girls staring fearfully out the wagon’s rear pucker at the man on the knoll beneath the gnarled pine.

  When the women and Hawkins had ridden out of sight, Bontemps slid his rifle into the boot beneath his right thigh. He popped the cork on the bottle resting on the pommel of his saddle, and took a long drink, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a plum in a rain barrel.

  The slaver lifted his chin and poured the whiskey over the bandage. Sighing and shaking his head, he corked the bottle and gigged his speckle-gray down the knoll, riding stiffly, the bottle in one hand, reins in the other. The brace of .45s on his hips flashed in the afternoon sun.

  Bontemps reined his horse to a halt only a few feet in front of Tom’s bay. He raised the bottle. “Drink?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “It’s right soothing on my eye, which hurts like hell, as you might imagine.”

  Tom stared at the man, unblinking. Bontemps had positioned the sun behind his left shoulder. It bounced like javelins off the rocks. The man might have had only one eye, but Tom knew Bontemps was fast. He’d heard the stories, like the stories others had told about Navarro himself.

  He didn’t especially want to die by the gun of a human hookworm like Bontemps. But suddenly he wondered if his time had come. He felt limp as a worn-out fiddle string, his reactions slow as a cat walking through mud. Maybe he’d burned himself out. Even if he was faster than this
bastard, did he still have his edge?

  It didn’t really matter. He’d sprung Karla and the other girls. How many good years did he have left, anyway?

  “Here I am,” Bontemps said, contempt pinching his voice shrill, “facing the infamous ‘Taos Tommy’ Navarro! I’m just sorry you’re so old and dried up.”

  “You can call me Tom,” Navarro said, surprised by the steel he heard in his own voice. He suddenly had the very real urge to pay a visit to that stage station in Benson someday. “Since you’re fixin’ to die.”

  The men stared at each other, the grin slowly fading from Bontemps’ eyes, his cracked lips straightening.

  The slaver flexed his right thumb. His hand streaked to the pistol on his right hip.

  Tom’s .44 came up automatically, stabbing smoke and fire. As the bullet tore through the slaver’s chest, Bontemps crouched over his saddle horn and triggered his own revolver.

  Navarro’s bay crow-hopped, quarter-turning, carrying Tom from the path of the slaver’s slug. Bontemps’ own horse bucked, and the dying slaver fell down its side, catching his right foot in the stirrup.

  The speckle gray bolted down the canyon, Bontemps bouncing along the trail beside it, arms flung out above his head.

  Navarro sleeved sweat from his brow and watched until the horse and slaver disappeared around a thumb in the canyon wall. He holstered his pistol and squinted up at the sun, arcing slowly toward the bald crags in the west.

  Several hours of good light left. With luck and hard riding, they’d make the border day after tomorrow.

  Navarro straightened his hat and kneed the bay into a canter, heading down canyon toward the Arabian and its tawny-haired rider galloping toward him.